IN J.D. SALINGER'S book Franny and Zooey there is a scene in which Franny, a 20-year-old theology student, has just come home from college a nervous wreck. Her concerned mother, Bessie, brings her a cup of chicken soup. Franny, unhappy and impatient, pushes the soup away. Franny’s brother Zooey is indignant. “I’ll tell you one thing, Franny,” he says, “if it’s religious life you’re studying, you ought to know that you are missing out on every single religious action that’s going on in this house. You don’t have enough sense to drink a cup of consecrated soup, which is the only kind of chicken soup that Mom ever brings to anybody.”

Zooey saw the kitchen as a church, his mother as a kind of priest, the soup as blessed, the welcome for Franny as God’s greeting. Is Zooey right in thinking like this? Is he going to far? No; I would says he is dead right! Why do we limit God? Where does this tendency of ours to limit and contain God come from? ‘God is my God’, we instinctively think. ‘God is here and not there.’ But Epiphany is the celebration of the continuing effects of the Incarnation. It’s as if Christmas is the epicenter of an earthquake with continuing tremors and aftershocks that expand throughout time and the universe. Maybe we could feel an aftershock or two this morning.

“When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of King Herod, be-hold, Magi from the east arrived in Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We saw his star at its rising and have come to do him ho-mage.’” Scholars have labored to discover what Matthew’s ‘star’ might have been. Everything from Halley’s Comet to some kind of supernova has been suggested. Most likely it was the conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn aligning themselves with each other, which they did three times in 7 BC. This in no way invalidates Matthew’s allusion to the Book of Numbers, which speaks of a star “arising from Jacob”, a phrase that refers to the Messiah’s coming from David’s lineage.

We really can’t be certain if celestial happenings are why the ‘wise and learned’ men came from the East. Matthew is definitely not offering us the kind of cozy, picture-book story that we have created for ourselves out of it, with strange but gentle Oriental kings bringing gifts to a child in a stable. Matthew, in fact, says nothing about a stable; as far as we know from his gospel, Mary and Joseph were living in Bethlehem at the time, only moving to Nazareth later. Nor does Matthew say the visitors were themselves royal.

The word ‘Magi’ covered a wide range of people that practiced the occult arts: astronomers, fortune-tellers, priestly augurers and Magicians of varying degrees of plausibility. Matthew himself is probably thinking of astronomers. The Magi’s arrival on the scene of the infancy narrative introduces us to something which Matthew wants us to be clear about from the start, namely that, even though Jesus is king of the Jews, that doesn’t mean his rule is limited to the Jewish people. At the heart of many prophecies about the coming Messiah/King, there were predictions that his rule would bring God’s justice and peace to the whole world.